The cheerful colors of the books cover already say it: Lotman is of and for today. His pioneering semiotics of culture inflected the linguistic bias into a wide array of thinking about culture - not as distinct cultures-in-tension but as the environment that makes life livable. The many chapter titles like Lotman and... are telling: of the width of relevance of his ideas, of their interdisciplinarity, and of the spirit of collaboration. It gives the genre name Companion a new, vital and actual meaning. This book is a great gift to current cultural scholarship. * Mieke Bal, Cultural Theorist and Critic, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Netherlands * Inexhaustible in his curiosity and creative intelligence, Juri Lotman is one of the great modern thinkers about culture. His generous mind seemed to dart from place to place, casting a brilliant light wherever it turned. At moments of bafflement, I have repeatedly found in him a source at once of clarification and inspiration. This volume stands as powerful testimony to his generative power across a wide range of inquiries. * Stephen Greenblatt, John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, USA *
